Hindi
Veteran actor Jagdish Raj leaves for heavenly abode
MUMBAI: A mainstay of Bollywood for 21 years, the man who reportedly earned his recognition in the Guinness World Records as the film industry’s most typecast actor Jagdish Raj is no more. He is known for his role as a police inspector in at least 144 films.
Back in the 1960s, a big Hollywood casting director called Harvey Wood came and selected him for a police inspector’s role. Although he had done many films before as hero and villain, but he found popularity reprising the role of police inspector time and again.
Twenty years later, he bumped into Harvey Wood again. He looked at him and said, “Bloody hell! You’re still in the same uniform.” He asked Raj to mail him the details of all his films as he was onto a world record for the most occupational role. Later the Guinness book people sent a team to Bombay to verify facts before they entered his name in their book.
Born in Pakistan, Raj was featured in releases including Deewar, Don, Shakti, Mazdoor, and Imaan Dharam before he retired in 1992. He’s also known as the father of Bollywood star Anita Raj.
Raj had been in and out of hospital for the past two years and had respiratory problems. He died in Mumbai at 84 due to a respiratory arrest on 28 July, according to his son-in-law Rakesh Malhotra.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
